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Bridget Bergen: It's The Takeaway. I'm Bridget Bergen in for Melissa Harris-Perry.

SNAP or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is one of the most critical policy tools we have to address hunger and poverty in the US. During the pandemic, it was a literal lifeline. Congress temporarily increased SNAP benefits giving a boost of 15% to everyone who needed it and allowing all families to max out their eligibility based on the size of the family.

This month, the nearly three-year boost to a benefit used by more than 41 million Americans will end. Now that a carton of eggs costs about as much as college tuition, millions of families will have to stretch their food dollars even further. It's a tough blow, especially given the Child Tax Credit expanded for the pandemic was also allowed to expire. Data from the Brookings Institute shows that those monthly checks of up to $300 per child lifted more than three and a half million children out of poverty, something the Biden administration was very proud of.

President Joe Biden: Overwhelmingly, working families use the child tax rate to buy food and other basic needs for their families and it's helped cut child poverty by nearly 50% in the United States. 50%.

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It cut food insecurity for families by 26%.

Bridget: We asked you what the end of these critical policy initiatives means for your household.

Joy: This is Joy in Avila Beach, California. I will be profoundly affected by the disappearance of my SNAP benefits. During COVID, I was blessed with about a couple of $100 a month and now when this ends, it will drop down to 15 a month. It will profoundly change how I eat.

Julia Cochran: Hi, my name is Julia Cochran. I'm calling from Port Townsend, Washington. Yes, the reduction in food stamps is going to seriously affect me. I am a low-income senior, I live on about $1,100 a month, having $200 to $300 a month in food stamps was an incredible blessing and it allowed me to actually feed off full well-balanced diet all month long. Without having to go to the food bank or taking part in soup kitchens and that type of thing.

It's going to affect me and a lot of low-income seniors. We will have less access to healthy food, we'll have less access to the food that we are used to eating, that it's good for our bodies. I don't understand why they think anything got better for us after the pandemic ended.

Vee: My name is Vee, I'm calling from San Diego. Yes, this removal of the extra SNAP benefits is going to affect my household. Before the benefits, we got to about 20 days, we were able to make the food stretch and that includes the food stamps and going to the food distribution, food pantries. Now with the benefits, we were able to make it the full 30 days of a month, but now we're going to go back to 20 days a month, and then we're out of food stamps and we're basically out of food. It's very hard 10 days of the month.

Jesse: Hi, this is Jesse calling from Worcester. I receive SNAP benefits. I was really disappointed to find out that the COVID SNAP benefits were ending because with the extra $95 a month, I was just about able to eat completely off my SNAP benefits. Now I'm going back to figuring out what I'm going to do with the rest of my eating. I think it's a mistake and they finally started giving us enough money to eat and now they're taking it away.

Bridget: Joining me now is Jamila Michener, Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University, Co-Director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, and author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid Federalism, and Unequal Politics. Professor Michener, thanks for coming back to The Takeaway.

Jamila Michener: I'm happy to be back.

Bridget: Professor, can you spell this out for us? What does this mean for a family of three say in early 2022 versus now?

Jamila: Essentially, it means that people will have many fewer resources for feeding themselves and for purchasing not just sufficient food but healthy food which often is more expensive. In that time, the cost of food and the cost of living more generally, the costs for things like housing have gone up, and the emergency SNAP benefits that the US government was providing people allowed some way of mitigating increasing costs.

Although for many people, even those emergency benefits weren't sufficient. Now, without those benefits, there's really nothing to protect people from increased cost in the face of needs that have not changed. People still have to eat, they still have to feed their families, but now they simply have fewer resources for doing so.

Bridget: SNAP benefits have been limited and curtailed in multiple ways over the past 10 to 15 years. Why is it so popular to limit access to food assistance? What are our beliefs about who uses it and why?

Jamila: I think many social benefits, whether it's cash assistance or medical assistance, it's different for different benefits, but food assistance is among those that we think many people simply are not deserving of. We think maybe they're not working hard enough. We think that they're overly reliant on the government and that we need to make sure that they're independent, and so on, and so forth. The reality is that many SNAP beneficiaries work and that many of those that don't, don't because they can't.

They're caring for children, for elderly folks. They're facing illnesses. Most people want to eat and do everything they can to be able to. For those who don't, they usually are in genuine need, but our ethos and ethic of hard work that is connected to notions of deserving this really stop us from being able to implement policy that recognizes those needs.

Bridget: The expanded child tax credit was wildly popular in part because it was not means tested. Does the Biden administration have any ability to win a legislative fight about the tax credit in the current 118th Congress?

Jamila: That's the million-dollar question. I think I'd like to say there's always a chance, but it's an extraordinarily difficult uphill climb, in part because there are just a handful of Senators often that have the power in their hands to make these decisions, and given the structure of our political institutions. Those are the very people that believe what is stopping us in the first place, that people aren't deserving, that they're going to take advantage of these benefits, that these benefits are going to stop them from working. None of those things are true empirically. They're not evidence-based, but they're ideas that stop us from being able to gain the political support we need.

Bridget: For the sake of scale, how big is this program relative to the federal budget? We're in this moment where the GOP is demanding spending offsets to raise the debt ceiling. How could SNAP be sucked into the politics of the debt ceiling fight?

Jamila: What's interesting is that on the one hand, SNAP is a huge benefit because it serves over 40 million people so it's very big in many people's lives, but relative to the federal budget, SNAP is really a drop in the bucket. We spend about 113, somewhere in that zone billion dollars a year on SNAP, and I get it to a regular person that sounds a lot, like a lot, but compared to our federal budget, that is really a drop in the bucket.

We may say that it's about some fiscal responsibility but at the end of the day, programs like SNAP are not what is draining our federal budget. We're spending much, much more on many other things on defense spending and on many other things, and feeding people is really not something we're investing a lot in as a country writ large.

Bridget: Quick break. More on the end-of-pandemic era food assistance right after this. We're back and still talking with Jamila Michener of Cornell University about SNAP benefits. This is not a red-state, blue-state program. This is a benefit that people across the country are using on and are in need of.

Jamila: Absolutely. I just completed a research project where we were interviewing people in Kentucky about their experiences with these benefits, so not a blue state. They were saying how important the benefits were to them, how difficult it was when they lost them. Some states like Kentucky have already ended these additional allotments. Some of our fellow citizens in other states have already experienced what everyone else is going to be experiencing soon, many of them in red states. When you talk to those people, I spent time talking to hundreds of them, they're suffering the same pain. Being hungry in a red state and being hungry in a blue state are not functionally different.

Bridget: Some cities and programs across the country have experimented with direct cash payments to families which is what the expanded child tax credit is. How much more or less effective are the cash programs versus targeted assistance like SNAP?

Jamila: The cash programs have been shown in some cases to be quite effective and they can help people in a range of ways including ways that we might not have anticipated. They help people to be able to be more healthy, children attend school more, all sorts of effects. Often what we need is a complementary approach to make sure that people have the full range of resources that they need to thrive. There's no reason to think about these kind of things in opposition to each other. Sometimes one kind of funding like cash assistance can make another funding like food assistance more effective in people's lives because they have the full range of support that they need

Bridget: In the implementation of Social Security, our country made an enormous dent in the proportion of seniors living in poverty. Can you imagine a similar ability to address child poverty long-term through federal policy?

Jamila: Absolutely. We did it. We did it with the expanded child tax credit. We saw tremendous drops in child poverty. We saw really measurable improvements in people's lives. We've done it in the past with social security. We've done it in the present with the expanded child tax credit. It's not a matter of if we can, it's a matter of whether we're willing to. It's a matter of political will.

Bridget: Professor, we heard the voices of our listeners who are experiencing the fear of when this benefit ends and what it will mean for their lives. Can you talk about what happens next for people who simply cannot afford to buy food anymore?

Jamila: What happens next is essentially suffering and deprivation. People often have to make impossible trade-offs. That might mean eating less which, of course, is not good for health. To the extent that we're worried about people working hard and having personal responsibility, people who are unhealthy are not going to be able to flourish in the labor market. People also make other trade-offs. Maybe you buy food and you can't pay your rent and so now we're facing the problem of eviction. People are just more precarious.

Maybe they draw down their very few savings to buy food and when an emergency arises, they don't have savings to help tie them over in that emergency. There are a range of spillover effects. You don't go to the doctor because you don't have any savings and you don't have money because you're spending all of that on food and you don't want to get medical costs popping up. There are so many wide-ranging spillover effects that this is truly, even if you did across cost-benefit analysis. This is truly senseless. It's not helping us. It will not save money. It will aggravate many people's pain.

Bridget: Jamila Michener is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University and Co-Director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity. Thank you so much for speaking with us on the Takeaway.

Jamila: Thank you for having me.

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